Effective bandwidths at multi-class queues

Consider a queue which serves traffic from a number of distinct sources and which is required to deliver a performance guarantee, expressed in terms of the mean delay or the probability the delay exceeds a threshold. For various simple models we show that an effective bandwidth can be associated with each source, and that the queue can deliver its performance guarantee by limiting the sources served so that their effective bandwidths sum to less than the capacity of the queue.